1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a printing system having a number of printer devices, which are each fashioned as an independent component and which respectively have different properties.
2. Description of the Related Art
In printing centers, which are preferably provided with electrophotographic high-performance printers; whose print performance is 40 pages per minute or more, it has only been possible, for a long time, to produce printouts of one single color (monochrome). Printouts in a number of colors are now produced more and more frequently. Electrophotographic high-performance printers are currently, without further ado, capable of printing in two colors, i.e., in a what is referred to as spot color operation or highlight color operation. For example, such a printer is known from the Oce Printing Systems GmbH under the name PAGESTREAM® 200DSC.
In printing centers, a number of devices, e.g. devices for preprocessing and postprocessing are coupled with a printer device to form a printing system. It is frequently the case for print orders, when brochures or books are prepared in low or medium numbers of print editions of between one and a few thousand copies, that a number of black-and-white successive pages must be printed and that only a few color sheets are to be printed. The color design can vary from two colors up to full color images.
In order to be able to carry out such print orders in a performance-adapted fashion, i.e., adapted to the respective properties and printing speeds of the involved printer devices, Published International Application WO-A1-99/09459 (PCT/EP98/05111) suggested to couple printer devices with different color properties to a printing system and to collect the sheet sequences, which are prepared by the different printing systems, in a common sheet collecting device in a fixed sequence.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,574,831 discloses another printing system wherein a number of printer devices, whose printing speeds are relatively slow, are combined in a printing system, which has a higher printing speed than the individual printers. The individual printer devices of this printing system are essentially homogeneously structured among one another. The printing system supplies print data of the print order to the individual printer devices essentially at the same time. This increases the printing speed. U.S. Pat. No. 5,596,416 discloses a similar printing system, wherein a number of printing units are accommodated in a common housing. Incoming print data are internally allocated to the respective printing units and the pages produced by the different printing units are brought together in a common output unit.
European Patent 651 318 A2 discloses a printing system with a printer device, whose control is capable of being connected to a control of a postprocessing device, for example of a printer device, which prints; in a different color into the documents that have already been printed by the first printer device. Not only the data to be printed but also control data is always processed via the control of the first printer device which is referred to as intelligent printer device. This results in a relatively high data throughput in the first printer device.
European Patent 790 548 A1 discloses another printing system, wherein print data is distributed to a number of devices. In this printing system, the print data is also led via the control of a printer device. A disadvantage of this solution is also that the control of the printer device must be so intelligent that it can interpret control data or, respectively, print data for following print devices.
The Palladium™ Design Document, which has been suggested with respect to the Palladium Printing system in cooperation between the MIT/Project Athena upon participation of the companies Digital Equipment Corp., International Business Machines and Hewlett Packard as a reference implementation for the OSI Document Processing Architecture with regard to the standards ISO/IEC 10175, discloses an open printing system for tabletop printers.
The print production control system Oce Domain® is described in the printer's book of the Oce Printing Systems GmbH, ISBN 3-00-001019-X, edition 3c, May 1998, on pages 14-2 to 14-12. In this system, one or more printers are connected to preprocessing devices and postprocessing devices. The system controls and monitors the print production.
German Patent A1-44 22 619 describes a printing system, wherein an administration server can distribute print data to different printers. European Patent A1-806 721 discloses a printing system, wherein different printed pages of a print data stream can be output on different printers (A3, A4, colored paper, etc.).
European Patent A-0782068 and European Patent A-0826206 disclose printing systems, wherein at least one printer device is connected to a network.